Ensuring security in wireless communications has become a growing concern in recent times. Two way wireless communication is used extensively today by a wide variety of users. Police personnel, fire personnel, military personnel, commercial organizations, and ordinary citizens all often utilize two-way radios for communication. Traditionally, such communications were not secure, i.e., anyone with a radio or scanner on the communication frequency could receive and understand the communications. In today's environment, however, a much greater need exists for secure communications in areas where unsecure transmissions were previously sufficient.
In the past, secure transmission systems in the past generally were limited to systems involving high levels of national security. To achieve secure transmissions, encryption techniques are used in high end systems. These techniques involve scrambling a signal (either digital or analog) upon transmission, and then unscrambling the signal upon reception.
The need to add encryption to everyday systems, however, presents a new set of concerns. Currently, in order to make communications secure, two options are available. First, an entirely new system can be installed that contains encryption technology built into each radio, similar to the high end systems used previously in applications involving national security. The problem, however, is that this approach requires replacing all of the existing hardware currently being used. All existing systems and radios would become obsolete. Because of this limitation, this solution is extremely expensive and cost prohibitive in many cases.
A second, less commonly used option is to install a new component in existing radios to provide encryption. This approach also has significant limitations. Any currently existing encryption components have been designed for specific brands and models of radios. Thus, this retrofit approach is limited in the types of radios to which it can be applied. Furthermore, this approach is costly in that even after the encryption components have been purchased, each radio must be disassembled, the encryption component installed, and the radio reassembled. As a result, this technique has limited practical application.
What is desired is to a system to provide secure transmissions in environments that were traditionally not secure. It is further desired to create secure transmissions in a cost effective manner, using existing radio equipment. This invention fulfills these desires, among others.